Energy is required to extract, deliver, and process water supplies; and the most widely used means of energy production require significant quantities of water. The geological topics of energy and water resources may be taught in a decoupled manner, but energy and water systems are inextricably linked from the perspectives of engineering, economics, environmental quality, and sustainability. This interrelationship has been labeled the "energy-water nexus," and it is receiving increasing attention from researchers, regulators, and planners. Active areas of research related to the energy-water nexus include water efficiency of energy production (especially renewable energy), desalination, and the water-related impacts of climate change on energy resources.

The energy-water nexus is also a pedagogically rich topic for Earth and environmental science educators because of its novelty to most students, its global and personal relevance; and because of the wealth of publicly available (DOE-EIA, USGS, NOAA, State agencies, etc.) quantitative data on water and energy systems that can be used in calculations, comparisons, and analyses small to large. Many coupled energy-water learning activities are analogous to those involving energy alone, such as the "water footprint" associated with personal or community energy use and the "water intensity" of different energy sources such as fossil-fuel combustion, nuclear fission, and concentrating solar. The energy-water nexus is also immediately relevant to discussions and studies of climate change and public policy.

Dr. Semken is an associate professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University. He is an ethnogeologist and geoscience education researcher whose work is in place-based, interdisciplinary, and cross-cultural geoscience education; and on regional geology and sustainability in the American Southwest.

October 15-17, 2017
Carleton College, Northfield, MN
To address the need to strengthen computational skills, this workshop will bring together faculty from the sciences who teach computation and are interested in strengthening their skills and developing MATLAB-based teaching resources. Application deadline: September 8, 2017

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